Month: April 2011

Relay for Life 2011

After my introduction to Relay for Life last year (well, beyond donations, which I’d done for several years already), I decided to “officially” join this year. On May 6&7 this year, my mom’s laboratory will be participating in Miami County’s Relay for Life. During this time, they will have someone always walking the relay route. Mom and I will be walking on Friday evening since she’s working Saturday (subbing for one of her friends recuperating from surgery). I could do the alnighter again, like I did last year, but it’s mom’s friends, not mine, who are there. I get on OK with them, but it won’t be the same without mom.

If you’ve been meaning to send some money along to the American Cancer Society or have been wondering where your next donation should go to, why not contribute to my Relay for Life goal? My page is available at the Relay for Life website.

If you’re feeling overly generous, mom could use some donors too.

Don’t feel bad if you’re not able to donate at this time. I always take my time to figure out which organizations will be getting my hard-earned money. I like what the American Cancer Society is doing for people fighting the long, hard battle, so ACS will continue to get my support. Each person has their own priorities and the ACS might not be one of yours at the moment. But if you can help out with our Relay team, we’d all appreciate it. Thanks in advance!

Secret Garden

We had a reprieve during the monsoon season today and I was able to get out and take a walk this afternoon. I decided to go see my “secret garden” which I discovered last year on my walks. It’s just someone’s very nicely planned backyard with lotsa flowers, but to me it was a pleasant surprise on a walk one day last year. I decided it was my secret garden and it’s something I like to treat myself with from time to time when walking.

I know, I should work on making my own backyard into a secret garden. But that sounds like work. Still, I am going to have someone come in and at least make my front yard purtier. (Heh heh, she said “purtier”!) I called Chaney’s nursery today and told them to “put me on the list” to do the landscaping job that Curt designed.

The only real thing I asked him to change was remove a buckthorn from the plan since it’s an invasive plant in Ohio. He swapped it out with a weigela that is grafted onto a tree. A mutant plant in my front yard! Booga booga boo! Here’s his vision of what my front will be:

Landscape plan for the house

Happy Anniversary, Mom & Dad!

Today marks the 43rd anniversary of my parents’ wedding. They’ve been sweethearts since junior high school, which is really quite nifty. To celebrate, I’m taking ’em out somewhere tonight for steak. Hopefully they’ll have picked a restaurant by the time I get there. 🙂

Anyhoo, feel free to join me in my virtual toast to the greatest parents a weird kid like me could have ever hoped for.

<toast>Thanks, mom & dad, for falling in love, getting married, and having me & Amy. It’s been a great ride thus far!</toast>

Beautiful Day!

According to my computer, it’s 82F outside, which I can well believe. All of my windows are open & letting in the fresh air. Linus is asleep on the computer desk and Lucy is asleep somewhere else in the house. 6 out of 10 windows have brand new pet-proof screens, and when the weather returns to normal, I’ll have the other 4 replaced as well. (No more Linus-sized hole in the living room window – yay!)

I got the quote back on the landscaping for my house. The design looks great, but doesn’t utilize native plants. (Apparently the nursery doesn’t actually have many native plants to sell). Still, the quote was in my budget and I think I’m going with it after a check to make sure at least none of the plants are invasive species. (I wonder if it’s even legal for nurseries to sell invasive species. No idea.)

I’ll need to *sniff* have the Bradford Pear tree taken down in front. I hate to have a live tree cut down, but its twin already fell on my house and was removed and it’s only time before it follows suit. I’ll be getting a flame maple for my front yard which, theoretically, only gets to 20′ tall.

Not going to do anything with my back yard yet. Maybe next year that can be my home improvement project. I have 2 black walnut trees in the back already (both weeds that have really taken to the place) and want at least 1 maple in the back as well. And I need a place to sit & read under a shade tree. 🙂

In a bit, I’ll go on a nice walk through town. Lunch today was Chinese Buffet, so I need some activity points to counteract that. Heh. (I am NOT a WeightWatchers poster child, that’s for sure!)

So let’s hear it for beautiful days, open windows, and sleeping kittens!

Home again, home again!

I stepped back into my house at 10 til 11pm last night. Linus was glad to see me. Lucy, I suspect, resented my leaving in the first place. Indeed, she didn’t join me in bed all know (as far as I could tell). I think she’s finally forgiven me, now.

While taking a walk through town this afternoon, I noticed just how different a walk in my town versus a walk in Chicago truly is. No tall buildings to crowd out the light or funnel the wind. No sirens going off every 5 minutes or so. Still, the walk is the same walk I’ve taken loads of times and I know practically every nuance of the walk. I can’t say the same for my walks in Chicago. (I’m sure if I lived there, I’d wind up knowing every nuance.)

I love visiting Chicago. But, as the saying goes, I wouldn’t want to live there. Sure, it takes me the same time to walk to judiang‘s grocery as it does for me in town to walk to my Aunt Becky’s house. It’s neat being able to take public transport instead of driving everywhere. But in my home town, I know a lot of the folks, and if I don’t, it doesn’t matter, we still say “hi!” and maybe even have short chats. Some smiles & waves to folks in Chicago, but not as many, percentage-wise, as here.

I’ll miss the wonderful dining. We ate at Zapatista, a Mexican joint near Judi’s place the evening that elsaf arrived. Actually, “joint” is too coarse a word. It was definitely a restaurant. But even though it was a little hoitier toitier than my usual Mexican joints, the prices were rather reasonable for Chicago. I started with a rather yummy and refreshing mohito, then I had pork carnitas with a pineapple salsa that were quite yummy. I liked the Mexican rice (thankfully a small portion) but not the refried beans (I had expected to get black beans, but got these instead – maybe I misread the menu). For dessert, I had the tres leches cake. Yummy and moist, but not quite as good as the one I had in Minnesota (that’ll take some doing to beat).

We waddled back to the apartment to enjoy the company and wait (and wait and wait) for Judi’s partitioning to finish. Thankfully, it was done by 1am and the OS wasn’t hosed. I’ve since gotten the backup going and I hope Judi’s computer is now nice to her from this point on.

Saturday was Dim Sum day. Yes, I’d been eagerly waiting this meal for over a week. No Dim Sum places around here, so I must take them when I can get them. After the delicious Dim Sum, Elsa drove us to Costco so Judi could purchase her birthday present – a new TV for her bedroom. The whole time Elsa was driving through Chicago streets, I was thinking “thank god it’s Elsa and not me!” (Another reason to love living in my dinky town!)

Before my evening flight, I talked the girls into going to Marble Slab (since we’d been cheated on Judi’s birthday) one final time. I had chocolate peanut butter ice cream in a waffle cone. And that kept me sated until I walked in the door of my house. (Whereupon I had a handful of cashews and a slice of toasted beer bread. Heh.)

Oh, and another advantage to small towns & cities? I was actually in the shuttle to my parking place at the time that my plane was supposed to touch down. Heh. Columbus airport – almost as small as Dayton International. 🙂

Anyhoo, a fun trip was had by treen. I hope Judi and Elsa have some excellent fun until Elsa has to drive back home on Monday. Thanks, girls, for the fun time!

Have Tech, Will Travel

So last night & today, I’ve been in full-on tech mode, helping poor judiang get her PC back to some semblance of normal after it had been Geek Squaded (not a pleasant thing to happen to any technology). It’s currently having its OS partition joined with the formerly locked & hidden “recovery” partition which is now useless since it became Geek Squaded. Here’s hoping I don’t bork the OS!

We had a lovely day yesterday. It was another sunny & chilly day in Chicago. I walked over to Jewel in the morning to get some cereal, milk, and fresh fruit for breakfast and became jealous of Judi when I noticed it only took me 5 minutes to walk there. (Takes 10 minutes to DRIVE to my nearest grocery.) Judi was off getting her hair done (to repair an earlier job that hadn’t gone to her satisfaction), so I had some time alone with Patty in the morning.

We had considered walking all the way to Whole Foods to eat at the food court & explore the food, followed by Best Buy to pick up an external drive. But Judi decided it was better to bus there and head to Manny’s for lunch instead. I was OK with that. Manny’s is a relatively famous cafeteria/deli in Chicago – even Obama ate there. You definitely don’t leave the joint hungry!

I ordered a bowl of cream of broccoli soup and half of a pastrami on a Kaiser roll sandwich (which also came with pickles and a potato pancake) and some strawberries. They put about 4 tons of pastrami on the sandwich and I highly suspect they gave me cream of chicken soup instead of the other (or else it just didn’t have much of a broccoli flavor). It was good, but I did leave some of my sandwich on the plate when we left.

Despite Best Buy being the home of the Geek Squad, we went there next so Judi could get a new external HD (her old one was a measly 320GB in size and she’s got 1TB of storage on her PC now) and a USB hub. She picked a WD 2TB external drive (me, jealous?) and the second cheapest USB hub and we were off home again. I then spent much of the afternoon fixing her music collection and beating iTunes with a hammer.

Did you know that, if you have to do a fresh install of iTunes with no iTunes backup, you have to go to the iTunes store and attempt to repurchase EVERY APP you originally bought for your devices? Thankfully, you don’t have to pay for them a second time, but you have to find & install them all individually. Thank goodness I don’t have an iPod Touch or iPhone. Judi’s gonna have so much fun!

For supper, we opted for default Thai. So we walked to Ma & I for pad thai (mine with tofu, Judi’s with shrimp) and while there, noticed that Marble Slab (ice cream joint) is open again for the season. So after supper, we headed across the street for ice cream. I got coconut, which was yummy.

Today, I had a light breakfast just like yesterday and Judi and I walked to Target for a USB flash drive. She couldn’t find the Ultimate Boot CD USB drive I’d given her a couple years ago for Xmas, so I recreated it on this new drive. It’s now doing what I said earlier. We went to A Capella for lunch, where we both got soup and BLTs. I had the tortellini soup, which was yummy. The BLT was yummy too. No one else was there in the restaurant, but that didn’t stop our waiter from being late serving Judi her tea…

We WERE going back to Marble Slab for more ice cream, but despite an opening time of 2pm (which it was), it wasn’t open when we arrived. We popped into a corner store for a bit, but 15 minutes later, the joint was still closed. We walked back, sad that there’s no ice cream.

elsaf is apparently on her way. Here’s hoping she’s having an easy drive today!